‘How Does One Translate This into Literature’: Using Scientific Concepts like Multiple Coincident Realities

Some of your stories seem to focus on quantum theory. In ‘Medieval Times’, for example, there are multiple references to the chaos theory, the string theory, the butterfly effect. What are the reasons behind these abundant references?

I was at ‘Medieval Times’, near Chicago, one of these elaborate ‘medieval-fairesque’ shows that stage jousting matches and other performances as part of a medieval ‘experience’ with a lot of liberties taken (such as the laser-light show that’s part of the jousting match). It’s all in an arena-sized building, like described in the story, and highly produced with its high-tech lighting and sound systems. In the midst of all the technology used to put on the show, there was a guy with a shovel whose job it was to clean the horse shit. And it got me thinking about how, in the twenty-first century, in a global, high-tech world there was still this guy who had what was basically a job someone in the twelfth century could have had. And it got me thinking about all these continuities and re-emergences and historical echoes and ghosts we live among. (As someone once pointed out, we use technology from multiple centuries all of the time: from my teapot boiling water as one would 3000 years ago, to my pencil, which hasn’t changed much in 200 years, to the computer I’m typing this on.) Or as Faulkner put it: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’. Call it spooky action at a distance.
Within these echoes was how much superstition or mysticism we live among: e.g. evangelicals performing miracle cures and think the earth is 5000 years old, but also how ‘mystical’ most people’s understanding of the cosmos is, even if the language we use comes from the sciences – I mean, the average person uses buzz words like string theory and gravitons and Big Bang without really having much more understanding than those who attribute creation to God’s will – i.e. beyond human, or at least their understanding (and I include myself here). The vocabulary is different, but there was an echo of earlier modes of understanding in a plethora of speculative fiction, or novels with wizards, super heroes and the like. Same with things like our preoccupation with End Times, though we think of it in our own context of climate catastrophe or meteor strikes, or nuclear war.
So I was trying to work through some of these ideas about how we think, and how we have the fears and desires and jealousies and greed like those before us, although our tools are better, and our contexts are different, and really because of these differences we are both the same and different. Our reality is different than that of ‘Medievals’; instead of believing in demonic possession or ‘seeing’ statues weep (although that still happens), we imagine UFOs or use labels like schizophrenia or hyperobjects for things we don’t understand. So I was trying to bring this more contemporary sense of the physical and metaphysical sense of the world into the story. And, of course, especially during postmodernism there was a real emphasis on semiotics, language deconstruction – and understanding the world as a linguistic construction – which again, has strong corollaries in hermeneutics and other medieval reading and material practices.
Some of the concepts you mention, quantum theory, chaos theory, string theory, the butterfly effect, and others, help frame the way we think about ourselves and our world, just as Freudian concepts once (maybe still do?) shaped how people thought of themselves even if they’ve never read Freud. And also how Freudian concepts shaped modernist fiction. So I was trying to think of our contemporary moment through some of these concepts, both seeing similarities and differences to those of an earlier time – and wondering if we were really any different – and trying to tell the story through them; I was trying to build into these stories ‘directions’ for how to read them.
My hope was that the story itself would evoke a sense of chaos theory, emergence, feedback loops, and similar principles associated with making coherence out of complex occurrences but also that readers would be aware of these structures as a way to read both the story itself and the world outside the story (just as beginning a story with the words, ‘Once upon a time’, would cue the reader to understand that what follows is to be understood as a fairy tale).

In an article on ‘Visualization, Scale and the Emergence and Posthuman Narrative’ (2014), you mention some stories as ‘emergent narratives that can produce unexpected effects’?1 Can you linger on this notion of emergence?

It goes back to something author Ronald Sukenick said back in the eighties: that those nineteenth-century novels of traditional-plot arcs, and rounded characters, were interesting, but that they didn’t seem to have anything to do with his life. As time went by, the gap between the form of the novel and the contemporary moment seemed to widen; if art forms are a reflection of their times, then why were we still plotting out narratives like Dickens? No one would expect a twenty-first-century song to sound like a nineteenth-century song, or a twenty-first-century building to have the architecture of one built in 1850 – unless you were doing it ironically, or in a postmodern self-referential way.
Increasingly, plots of cause and effect began to seem to me very linear, very Darwinian, or Newtonian. And out of step with a world marked by global interconnectedness, an absence of centers, erosion of privacy, blurring of all kinds of boundaries, an ease of recombination, interactivity, infinite linkage and therefore indeterminacy. We think of being as pattern rather than essence. I’m listing some of the qualities that critics see as characteristic of our cultural moment, which includes a posthuman, or emergent manner of seeing.
I’d always been drawn to plotless novels, especially those that seemed to acknowledge the narrative (i.e. invented) nature of history and other ‘non-fictions’. Trying to explain, or even depict, a phenomenon that has a plethora of causes through linear cause and effect didn’t seem to work. In the sciences, chaos theory might be used to explain complex physical phenomena like climate change or social phenomena such as a riot, and those frameworks seemed to be a much more realistic form for depicting contemporary life in general than optical or sensory metaphors (i.e. thinking of the novel as a ‘mirror traveling down the road of life’ as Stendhal put it).
But how does one translate what are essentially mathematical models into literature? Every form of information design is a form of writing under constraint: by choosing the architecture of one system, be it a haiku or a grocery list, we enable some values and disable others, and the concept of emergence, whereby small patterns give rise to larger patterns, which in turn give rise to larger patterns still, seem to be one that was more in sync with our world rather than the plot structures Dickens used to model his world. But organizing a novel under principles of emergence necessitates a change in scale. And shifting to a scale that would allow for the kind of overview needed for big-data analysis or chaos theory means sacrificing the scale at which humans interact with each other or their world as individuals: the scale at which the novel is particularly adept, the scale humans interact with each other on a one-to-one basis.
So could the novel even do such a thing, or would a much better means to tell such a narrative be through something like big-data analysis? Rather than embodying a viewpoint within a human character like Moll Flanders or Robinson Crusoe, rather than embodying the viewpoint of an artist or author, I tried to use more dissipated viewpoints, leaving their traces as data points, as pattern, which together form what K. Hayles would refer to as ‘information narratives’: narratives where pattern’s overwhelming presence in that pattern is what captures our attention, informs our interpretation, rather than, say, a semiotic reading of the world through an individual embodied viewpoint.
Yet it was also important to bring this bird’s-eye, or data-eye view into the characters’ lives, so I move back and forth between the scales at which the story is told. My hope is to render the personal but to do so in such a way that the personal stories give rise to, or intersect with larger stories, which themselves give rise to still larger stories, the way my story, ‘WeKIA’, I hope, tells the story of two people out to buy a kitchen table, but in so doing, they become one among many people buying kitchen tables – a larger pattern – let’s call it ‘shoppers’, who give rise to larger patterns still – ‘shipping lanes’, for example, that give rise to larger patterns still – say ‘global networks’ for finance, and communication, the feedback of which affects the individuals moving through this landscape of networks at a granular level: as, for example, in something as simple as following the suggestions of their phone, an automated algorithmic system that has itself emerged from its own set of patterns and feedback loops to show, in the story, how to return home.
Just as the telephone disembodied voice and altered people’s conception of being ‘in touch’, I hope what comes across in the story is that ideas that are as basic, and personal, as our notion of ‘home’ are being altered by the technology we use. That is, the story is really about the kind of emergent culture, and human, that arises out of millions of individual actions on a nationwide, or global, scale that in turn changes the character of lived life, and so the individual. On the surface, it’s about two people setting out to buy a table, but I hope it evokes other emergent phenomena such as global interconnectedness, the permeability of boarders, the relationship of these technological systems to the food we eat, the way we live, and how living in a landscape such as this shapes all of us.
I hope the same dynamic is at work in a story like ‘Self-Portrait(s)’ in that the characters and their actions are more of a kind of emergent behavior (why do we think and act differently than people in previous generations? Why does our art look different? Aren’t these kinds of emergent behaviors and their consequences the reason art has a history at all? – and not in the way that his history may have been told before: The Great Man of History theory by which all ‘progress’ was the result of great men (and I use the gendered noun intentionally here)). The story is more about these kinds of emergent patterns as articulated through the lives of characters, more than they are characters who are individuals, making decisions that bring a world into existence – along with all the other emergent phenomenon such as genetic permeability, the relation of art to technology and science, and art to bodies, that the story is also about.

Art and science. How do they interact in your short stories?

I remember being young and unable to wrap my mind around the idea of mimesis, especially as it related to epistemology – how do we know what we think we know? Art and literature are inherently subjective, that’s their strength. But subjectivity infuses any human endeavor, including science. Witness all the effort in science that goes into minimizing subjectivity. What attracts me to using, or addressing science in fiction, is that it is much harder to see the cultural or subjective nature in a scientific question than it is in ‘soft’ fields – it’s much harder to see a scientific statement as a linguistic construction than it is to understand a poem in this way; thus, non-fiction, and scientific writing in particular, are good test cases for the idea that what we accept as ‘real’ is often a matter of linguistics, which in a way is the idée fixe that runs through all of my fiction, going back to its roots in mimesis.
Many scientists will still argue that there is no cultural or gender bias in science. (A position that can be adopted since science does not take up any question that can’t be answered scientifically.) But I’m really drawn to using scientific narratives, or narratives inflected by science as a way to think about how a fact is created, or how we know what we know, the role of language in all of this, and how what we are is so contingent on how we answer these questions. (See, for example, my stories ‘The Risk – Taking Gene among Some Asian Subjects’ or ‘The Atlas of Man’.) (And maybe this is why literature is so bad at providing answers, but good at asking questions?)
In this way, I use short stories as a kind of thought experiment – especially to explore how our biases and temporal centrism are embedded in language itself. For example, while writing ‘The Risk – Taking Gene among Some Asian Subjects’, I was reading studies that were looking for a genetic basis for behaviour. One study was looking for a gene for ‘anger’ and I remember thinking how naïve it seemed to discount the linguistic component. I mean, I could probably think of twenty different definitions of ‘anger’ but, for the sake of objectivity, the study seemed to imagine ‘anger’ as one thing. And controlled by a single gene – in a very plot-driven, cause-and-effect, Darwinian way.
‘The Atlas of Man’ (which ends with the qualifier ‘If by Man We Also Mean Woman’), is mainly concerned with (again) representation and how the more we try to narrow it in pursuit of objectivity, the more diffuse ‘meaning’ becomes because there’s really no escape from our dependence on language, and all the biases and assumptions our use of it contains. If you have a nineteenth-century culture, you’ll have nineteenth-century science; if you have a racist culture, you’ll have racist science. So will a culture with any kind of blinders on (and name one which doesn’t have its own peculiar blinders). When this story was included in a Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology, I was really surprised because for me none of this is really science fiction; more like fiction about science, or fiction that uses science to think about ontological or epistemological questions, but also all the other cultural components that make up our reality, e.g. facial recognition, data mining to define us as consumers, privacy laws, the very idea of privacy and how it’s the foundation for individuality, and the role of things like these in the shape literature takes in different centuries…
A few years before Bruno Latour died, I had a chance to talk with him, and he was sort of lamenting the irony of being taken up by creationists, and anti-vaxxers. What he meant was, just because science creates narratives, as he argued, doesn’t mean you can make up anything. Its constraints might be different from those of a novel, but in the end, it is still a very human creation. And the narratives we make out of very material considerations often determine the most fundamental questions about who we are, even who lives and who dies. Elements of this run through all my fiction, I think, as in the ones you cite, even if the stories are not primarily about science per se. Or call it the relation between the physical and linguistic world.

I once went to the vet for a guinea pig. He had a sort of glaucoma. Before starting examining his eye, the vet tried to pay homage to the beauty of his eye haemorrhage, comparing it to a painting. My children and I were disgusted. Ironically, I answered we could also make a necklace with the other rodents’ balls on screen that he emasculated. (Was my ex-vet posthuman?) There are similar descriptions in your stories, notably when Mary tries to fertilize a blastocyst in ‘Self-Portrait(s)’. More positively, are these literary descriptions clearly signs of symbiotic relations between scientific anatomy and artistic anatomy?

Ha! I love this story about your ex-vet (and the necklace). Though there wasn’t much bedside manner there, was there? He’d probably get along with Mary, though: a research assistant who performs experimental surgeries on animals by day, and by night uses the same tools (genetic engineering, artificial fertilization and the like) to create works of art. Instead of working in paint or fabric like some other artists, the materials of the body – blood, eggs, semen, flesh – are her medium. The story references a number of artists who work in body art – like Marc Quinn, who drained blood from his body, then poured into a mold of his head, which was frozen and removed from the mold to be a self-portrait bust. In these works (as well as Mary’s), the material shapes the message: e.g. a portrait bust made of the sitter’s own frozen blood radically foregrounds connotations about identity, or conceptions of the self or mortality. If the refrigerated case that Quinn’s bust is in is unplugged, the self-portrait will melt in contrast to a bust made out of marble, for example, like those of a Roman emperor, the material there making a case for permanence of reputation, and a person’s identity being baked into their surface features.
Another work that’s referenced in the story is Eduardo Kac’s GPF Bunny, the rabbit that Eduardo had genetically modified so it would fluoresce green when under a blue light. The technique used to make the rabbit glow green was common in labs by the time he used it to make art. I think it had been used for something like ten years in labs to do things like make tumors in mice glow green so that the mice wouldn’t have to be killed and dissected to study their tumors. But when Eduardo made a rabbit, using the same techniques to make art – something that had no functional purpose – many people were outraged. His work reminded me of Duchamp’s Fountain in that both of them took something practical, and transformed it into art by divorcing it from its practical function. But I think the ontological stakes are higher when it comes to body art.
In the story, Mary ‘constructs’ a ‘portrait’ by using a trinity of donors as ‘parents’, calling into question, in a posthuman way, what words like ‘father’ and ‘mother’ mean in an age where the materials of the body can be treated as a medium, edited, rearranged. The dynamic of her art echoes the way that the meaning of the word ‘Earth’ changed after Galileo demonstrated that our planet was no longer at the center of creation. Or the shift that the word ‘human’ went through after Darwin. Likewise, what do these old body words mean when the courts are called in to decide the ‘ownership’ of a child that is the result of sperm bought from a bank, an egg bought from a paid donor, and artificially implanted in a womb that has been rented from the surrogate who gives birth to the child who is raised by the men or women who underwrote all the other costs? What if we further edit those genes, either before birth or at any point of the person’s life afterwards?
Kac was never able to enact what I think of as the main point of his artwork: he intended to bring the rabbit home to live with his family. But because of import and export laws, the rabbit being biological research ‘materials’, and other constraints, he was never able to get it out of France, which was a shame, as the whole point was to foreground how these kinds of genetic ‘Frankensteins’ (if I could use that word), were already part of our daily lives, in our food supply, in our medical procedures, in our bodies, etc. In ‘Self-Portrait(s)’, Mary is doing something similar, working with the idea of identity, and how every self is plural, an emergence of cultural and historical forces, as well as material, especially the materials of the body: and all the consequences that fall out from this plurality, the blurring of individual boundaries, basically, the postbiological world we are living in, but which has emerged so gradually that we don’t notice it – until someone creates a work of art (or a breakthrough science or technological achievement, like Dolly the Sheep) that attracts our attention.
My novel VAS: An Opera in Flatland comes closest to your idea of scientific anatomy and artistic anatomy, as in one scene where I have a character perform a dissection by trying to follow the illustrations in an anatomy book. Of course, the actual dissection is far more messy than the textbook depicts. Its illustrations, like all illustrations, can only be a cartoon of any one’s actual, idiosyncratic body. An average that doesn’t actually fit anyone – and I hope it can serve as a metaphor for the wider issues of representation, the relation of science and technology to life, etc. Given that the body has become a medium for writing in that we can literally edit its genetic letters, I tried to use the body of the book as a metaphor for actual bodies, and actual bodies as a metaphor for writing.

Can we say some of your stories have a quantum motive? ‘Why do men and women rush into each other’s arms when the sky is falling? What graviton draws two bodies together, makes them hold and want to be held when stars fly apart?’.2

Yes, and I like your phrasing of a ‘quantum motive’, though I wouldn’t want to draw the analogy between science and literature too tightly. Still, I was hoping to use some of these concepts, like multiple possible realities existing at the same time (e.g. the Choose Your Own Adventure endings; multiple histories written out of the same ‘facts’; the increasing displacement of humans from the ‘center of the universe’; DNA sequencing doing for humans what Darwin did for Adam and Eve, or Copernicus did for the Earth). I think what I was hoping to do in the stories comes across more in some of your other questions, so I’ll refer you to them.

When you assert that ‘the point of view is always that of the spectator’,3 is it a way to transpose Einstein’s idea of relativity into fiction? Or shall we understand the real as complex, emerging and unreachable? Whether ideas are transmitted on pictures and pages, or whether facts are asserted scientifically or technically, things always escape us or can only be seen partially.

#Yes, though I would hope that in addition to your reading of the stories there are others that are valid (is that a quantum position? – dependent on the observer?). The passage you’re referring to has to do with the role of a narrator or observer or whatever we want to call the viewpoint from which we understand history, facts, or whatever we call the construction that arises from it. A role that gets articulated in different ways, the relation between observer and observed in Einstein’s relativity, or more generally in Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, or I’d say the role of the author in meta-historiography, or even biography or autobiography. As you’ve noted, a lot of ‘Medieval Times’ is involved with the parallels between postmodernism and the medieval perspective (the discovery of new planets, our plagues and their Black Death (and this was before Covid), the religious wars both then and now (at the time of the story, Islamic fundamentalists were on jihad against the U.S., and President Bush framed the invasion of Iraq as a Christian crusade, a religious war – a war that continues, e.g. the Charlie Hebdo murders)). I wouldn’t want to be too literal about the parallels, but the passage you cite is in the context of the parallels in epistemology or ontology in that both ‘Postmoderns’ and ‘Medievals’ placed such an emphasis on semiotics and the ramifications for ontology that arise out of how we read signs and symbols.
Our sympathies are baked into the viewpoint character of any narrative, and in our own personal narratives (e.g. everyone is the ‘hero’ in their own story) even if that viewpoint character is plural. Global catastrophes always seem to happen to someone else – when watching a disaster movie, we always identify with the survivors, not the victims. We think we’ll be the ones to bear witnesses. (The answer to the question, ‘For whom does the funeral bell toll?’ is never the name of the person asking this question – i.e. it’s almost inherent in narrative form.) When we imagine two trains colliding, as the story says, we are never in one of the trains. We are an outside observer seeing it from a safe distance. But something similar is also true for other kinds of observations, including the ones that your question implies: i.e. objective observation is kind of an oxymoron. There’s no way to remove the observer from the observation in the way that true objectivity would require. As the nineteenth-century biologist in my novel Ascension puts it: ‘The scientist imagines that an objective conclusion depends on the gathering of facts, while facts, like light through a bottle are bent by glass, which is to say the scientist, though he or she can no more say how than can the bottle’.
Closer to our time period, we invoke things like relativity, or the contortions we have to go through to create a kind of artificial objectivity – an idea that runs through a number of the stories in Once Human. For example, in ‘The Atlas of Man’, the difficulty in trying to create objectivity out of very subjective humans is sort of a running joke through the story with the scientists in the story trying to invent a neutral language by which they could create facts while trying to interpret bodies and other physical phenomena (such as a smile, or a wearing of a hat), without going down a rabbit hole of so many qualifiers that in the end nothing can really be said. (See in this story the chain of footnotes to the word ‘precise’, each attempt to make the definition more precise requiring more words, more footnotes, which require footnotes, which require footnotes… And echo, I hope, the earlier mention of the myth about the earth being held up by resting on the back of an enormous turtle, which is itself held up by a turtle, which rests on… Turtles, all the way down.)
I think the second part of your question comes closer to the reality in these stories as being complex, and emergent: I’m thinking here of a second, less discussed interpretation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (HUP). As Karen Barad writes, the most commonly accepted interpretation is that we cannot know both the position and momentum of a particle. That is, HUP outlines an epistemological problem of what we can and can’t know because the act of measuring one quantity (position) changes other quantities (momentum). Embedded in this interpretation is an assumption that before any measurement is undertaken, there is a particle that has these properties that we may or may not be able to observe. But another, ontological, interpretation is that particles do not have any inherent properties (such as position and momentum). Rather we bring these quantities into existence by looking for them. We could look for completely different properties, and think of a particle as defined by them instead of position and momentum (cue Borges on this point!). And the more refined our observing apparatus, i.e. the closer we look, the more we exclude.
As you say in your question: things always escape us or can only be seen partially (to which I’d add: they also say as much about the observer as the observed, which is sort of the ‘thesis’ of my novel The Book of Portraiture). In short, is nature or reality something that has inherent qualities outside of human experience, or is nature or reality generated by our perceptions of it? To put it simply, is it a matter of ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ (epistemology) or as Charles Bernstein states in one of his poems, ‘I’ll see it when I believe it’ (ontology). Or, if a tree falls in the woods and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make any sound? Depends what you mean by sound. And no one. And tree, for that matter (semiotically). This was why medieval Chinese were able to see a supernova as an astronomical event, while Europeans, looking at the same thing, thought, because of their belief in a static, crystal mobile, that they were looking at an atmospheric event.
Then there is the fact that so much of our world, like that of ‘Medievals’, is invisible, mysterious, kind of a miracle that we take at face value: like pressing a key on a keyboard and having no idea how it makes letters appear on a screen; thus the footnote in ‘Medieval Times’ that explains how a keyboard works – not to explain it, but to bring to the fore how much about our own world we take on the basis of faith.

Do you consider plot events correlated the way particles are entangled? Thus the microcosmic and macrocosmic levels are related, the absence of a mosquito net explains the rise of the American nation (p. 232), a butterfly flying here can lead to a tornado there…

Yes, I often try to organize narratives along principles like these rather than traditional plot arcs. But I’d emphasise that I’m translating some of these principles into literature as a way to explore contemporary ‘realism’. So again, I wouldn’t draw too tight an analogy between poetry and science. Though I do appreciate the way Emerson expressed it in one of his essays: ‘I fully believe in both, in both the poetry and in the dissection’. At the time Emerson was writing the gap between science and religion was much narrower. Natural historians or natural philosophers, as scientists were called, often used their observations of the natural world to uncover the wonder of God’s handiwork; it was the growing gap between observation and Scripture that made the two hard to reconcile.
So I suppose I’m trying to channel Emerson’s sentiment in a more literal way than he intended. That is, principles or concepts that come out of science or mathematical models, like entanglement or the butterfly effect, are inspirations for ways to think, ways to tell a story; they are analogies for how to think about people living their lives in a world where we are able to manipulate life on both a global and microscopic level, and both are certainly entangled. The ‘dissection’ – be it something like mapping the genome, chaos theory, or analysis of exoplanets – opens up wonders about what it is to be human, our place in the cosmos, and all the other questions that science can’t answer, but that we can get an intimation of through ‘poetry’.

Your friend and Chicago neighbor Eduardo Kac defends the hypothesis of ‘a semiological continuum’. Are you defending the idea of semiological porosity between various domains of existence? What do you mean by the idea of ‘continuums of continuums can run free, not just Up. Strings tangle. Sideway and crossways in loopity-loops’ (‘Medieval Times’, p. 211)? Has it something to do with the notion of infinity or truth?

Yes, Eduardo and I have had conversations about this (in fact, right now, I’m looking at an Edunia that I have on a window sill – one of the flowers he created by merging the genome of a petunia with his own DNA, creating a ‘plantimal’: a plant-animal hybrid). I think this plant-animal hybrid may be less an example of a biological continuum as semiological (and biological) porosity; at the level of the gene, every creature is composed of the same genetic letters; but looked at from the level of ‘genre’, it could be seen as an example of permeability between plant and animal species. A plant that couldn’t exist in nature, no matter how intense its breeding or hybridisation. So, in this way, there is this semiological and biological porosity between various domains of existence.
But in the passage from ‘Medieval Times’ that you cite, I think I was trying to evoke more ontological associations, implying that continuums are still linear, still exist in the same ontological plane – if – and only if – we only look for them on one plane of existence. (We can look at the surface of an ocean, and see one horizontal continuum, or we can look vertically and see another, or abandon the concepts of horizontal and vertical all together and see vectors in millions of directions that draw in the sky, borders like shore lines, the effect of the moon on tides, all interacting with each other in feedback and other loops, etc., etc., which seems to throw the idea of continuum out the window, or at least turn it into a human-made taxonomy or construction: a cartoon we employ to help us understand something too complex to understand.) But if we abandon linearity, we can see how metaphors of ‘clouds of associations’ come into play rather than more linear concepts like a ‘continuum’. I’m thinking here of the second, less discussed interpretation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, that I mentioned above.
In ‘Medieval Times’, these analogies were partly how I was trying to draw the wider analogy between the world we live in and the Middle Ages, where people really did live in a different reality than our own. But the uncanny parallels between postmodernism, with its emphasis on semiotics and the body, and medieval obsession with semiotics as in St Augustine, and attention to the material world, including the body as semiotically loaded, are striking. For both ‘Medievals’, and us, ‘matter and meaning are not separate events’, as Barad says about the HUP. The spirit world infused everything in the medieval world (which reminds me of the agency that New Materialists ascribe to things today). And it’s the ontological jolts that happened during our lifetime that echo those of the Middle Ages that interest me here. I’m thinking of Galileo changing the position, and so meaning, of the Earth by observing moons orbiting Jupiter, as did our first observations of exoplanets, or the meaning of the ‘body’ and the ‘individual’ after modern ‘miracles’ like Dolly the Sheep, and the realization that all creatures share the same DNA, which can be rearranged into other entities, like Eduardo’s Edunia. I was thinking of the echoes between contemporary object-oriented ontology and the Great Chain of Being, the belief that every object in the natural world was a reflection of a continuum from the mind of God, down through the angels, then humans, animals, plants, to the lowest worm, rock, and final elements. Then there were the religious wars, both then and now – and how the young are used as fodder to feed wars.
But, of course, fragmentation, the ability to make a jump cut in the Great Chain of Being, so to speak, and create a plant that is part human, seems like a kind of alchemy or miracle, doesn’t it? – just because there’s a rational basis behind it doesn’t mean it isn’t miraculous. So, in this sense, our landscape is very different from that of the ‘Medievals’. The ‘Medievals’ had an obsession with seeing meaning in nature (e.g. the seven openings in the human face mirror the seven planets). Those in the Christian West thought of ontology through the body, e.g. crucifixion, flagellation, transubstantiation, etc., and the conception of the body through ‘miracles’ as do we. They may have suffered a shift in the ‘reality’ of their place in the cosmos via Galileo’s observation of Jupiter’s moons, while for us it was the modern miracle of Blue Marble Earth, or maybe exoplanets, though we quickly take modern miracles for granted. Nonetheless, we, like them (maybe like everyone all of the time?) are living through a revolution in ‘reality’ accompanied by a rise of superstitions, religiosity, conspiracy theories. I’ve always thought that looking back at Medieval Europe was like looking into an insane asylum; but then imagining how people of the future will look back at us, we seem even more insane – especially given how we have the benefit of hindsight, science, and global perspectives, which never seems to do us any good, or keep us from falling into our own short-sighted mistakes.

You are defending the idea of an ‘epistemology of emergence’ in your discourse. Can you clarify that idea?

Much of my fiction is informed by the processes by which we create knowledge, or bring a ‘fact’ into the world, or maybe I should say, ‘invent’ knowledge or ‘invent’ facts, without this really being an ‘invention’ by any one person or group of people – why we think and believe what we believe and think. I’m more interested in how knowledge emerges from numerous sources that converge, the way temperature, pressure, humidity, and other factors can converge to produce a dew drop. Only exchange words like ‘temperature’, ‘pressure’, and ‘humidity’ for words – or formations – like ‘venture capitalism’, ‘laws’, ‘assumptions’, ‘biases’, and the like. There isn’t really a cause-and-effect relation at work here; it’s much more related to chaos theory, or the way Foucault describes discursive objects coming into existence (especially if we consider the ‘rhetoric’ of physical objects, or Wittgenstein’s description of the meaning of a word as its use in practice: its language effects. Except, I give much more weight to the role of the physical in making meaning, unlike the deconstructionists who were focused on language, often to the exclusion of material concerns.
I’m especially interested in this in terms of humans, our representation, or our representation of others (e.g. just the word ‘other’ is really loaded with a lot of assumptions on the speaker’s part); and in terms of the idea of the ‘human’, for example, it’s impossible to not include the physical, especially the body, the body in nature, the body in culture, but also culture in the body, nature in the body, the permeability of all these spheres and ways of constructing them as spheres of knowledge and concern. They are all so interpenetrating, and suggest phenomena that we don’t even know exist, that at some point it’s like talking about God. Or something beyond understanding.

In ‘Self-Portrait(s)’, Mary tries to capture the artistic blue of stained glass and reproduce it in Petri dishes. Does this color transfusion induce a loss or a gain? Are we looking at the sky when we dig into mud?

That’s pretty much what I was thinking, though you put it in a more poetic way: I was trying to imply an equivalency, or an association between the religious iconography of the blue stained-glass window (blue was once reserved for holy subjects like the Virgin Mary because it was an expensive pigment to produce) and the way Mary as an artist sees the Petri dish as an analogy for ‘Blue Marble Earth’. We’re meant to also see this round, blue window as the glass of a Petri dish, another stand-in for the earth, and its contents, the earth as a culture growth of bacteria, sperm and eggs – the stuff of life – as being ‘holy’, the dawn light shining through it evoking the dawn of life.
In this way, our modern mythology of transformation of genes isn’t so much a story of gain or loss, as just a different telling of an old story. Maybe we are telling some of the same stories as the old religious myths, just in ways that we can relate to… But maybe the diminution is in the fact that the stained-glass window now has to be protected by bulletproof glass… Is a transformed world a fallen world, or has it always been fallen? Or never fallen? Despite all the transformations that the world goes through, does the totality remain the same?

What is the main enjoyment behind Eduardo Kac’s Genesis?

For me it was the particular sentence he placed at its center: ‘Let man have dominion over all the earth’ – that canonical line from the Bible that people once took to mean they could do whatever they wanted to do to the earth, including its plants, animals, seas, people… Using the genetic letters of a bacteria’s genes, Eduardo encoded this sentence into its DNA. Viewers in the gallery or online around the world were able to activate an ultraviolet light focused on the bacteria, which would destroy some of its genetic code.
By enlisting viewers to corrupt this sentence, Kac has staged a little performance that both enacts our ability to corrupt nature even down to the level of genome, but also that calls into question our decisions to act on this ability. What is left at the end of his performance is not a coherent sentence. It’s essentially genetic and linguistic trash. But it asks us, by implication, to consider this sentence as a call to be caretakers, not masters, of the earth, as some religious people interpret the Bible now that we are running out of earth to destroy, and the consequences of the old interpretation are becoming apparent on a global scale.

Is singularity a target in your prose? How would you define this notion related to your fiction and style?

Ha! You must be prescient. I hadn’t really thought of it this way, but I did just finish a short story, ‘Clay’, which doesn’t so much take aim at singularity as explores it. I’d been invited to contribute an essay to an anthology on consciousness in literature, but asked if I could write a short fiction instead, which the editors are including. The book hasn’t come out yet, but I could send the story to you if you’d like. (Its subtitle hints at an answer to your question about how singularity relates to my style: ‘Clay: A Sci-Fi Parable (with at Least Two Endings)’.)
It’s easy to be skeptical of singularity given how much of what passes for artificial consciousness seems to be elaborate forms of the ELIZA effect, especially given how little prompting we need to anthropomorphize any kind of activity from animals to machines. It’s hard to tell if calling a form of consciousness that doesn’t have an organic body implies a lack in our conception of consciousness. Or a deficiency in the language we use to describe it – which is probably implied in my fiction. This seems even more true if one believes that the mind-body split is exaggerated, false, or grossly misleading. I mean, just as the critics of Galileo weren’t entirely wrong: for them, the word ‘Earth’ meant fixed, unmovable, center of creation. So Galileo was asking them to change what the word itself had meant for thousands of years, a word rooted in the Earth itself given that the sun ‘rises’ in the east and ‘sets’ in the west – obviously going around the Earth.
Which maybe means that the question we should be asking instead is how did we human animals achieve consciousness. I mean, are we organic versions of AI? – given that with the large language models many expect singularity to arise out of essentially learning through trial and error, which could be a way to describe natural selection in the organic world. If we start with single-cell organisms and trace the trials and errors that led to us, can we conclude that we are just organic, thinking machines? That is, have we been giving human singularity too much credit for being unique? If recent research into the animal world makes anything clear, it’s that animal consciousness is far deeper than humans are aware of. But maybe it won’t be long before we’ll be saying something similar about machine consciousness…
I recently reviewed an autobiography written by ChatGPT, a book that e-author Mark Marino produced by feeding ChatGPT prompts to get it to write a story of its life. The first line of my review is, ‘If this is the future of literature, kill me now’ by which I meant that it was easy to imagine machines churning out genre fiction, movie scripts, poetry that was serviceable, even preferable by the mass audiences that turn pop songs or Hollywood movies into hits. And yet, ChatGPT kept coming up with lines like this: ‘It’s like trying to get a Shakespearian sonnet out of a Rubik’s Cube’. This sentence, which ChatGPT wrote about itself trying to write literature, seemed to indicate not just a level of self-awareness, but also a sense of self and the history of literature – with enough sophistication to joke about it. And ChatGPT kept doing this, over and over, throughout its memoir.
Or am I just falling victim to the ELIZA effect by having this reaction? In terms of literature, it’s hard for me to imagine writing in a way in which the style – call it a metafictional quality – doesn’t reflect a consciousness by calling attention to itself as a construction, thinking about itself as a construction compared to fiction that still believes in essentialism, a natural voice, or other qualities associated with old-school humanism. Put another way, after the postmodern period when the death of the author was sort of a given, the author has come roaring back. And I wonder if the rise of genres such as autofiction, or the premium placed on ethnic, or racial identity in fiction today isn’t partly a backlash to, let me call it, posthuman fiction… In the same way that philosopher Melanie Challenger says people will lean into their animal nature to assert their individuality, their ‘singularity’ at a time when it’s being questioned by, for example AI, which promises to be better than humans at not just chess, but also most ‘language games’ from poetry to medical diagnosis to waging war. A lyric poem might be one response to this development. But a poem in the tradition of language poetry might be more insightful, and ultimately even more human.

We cannot be really conscious of experiencing the quantum universe in the flesh, so would you like us to experience it in your prose?

I think I’d end as I began: that I look to quantum mechanics, emergence and other scientific or contemporary formulations as organizing principles in fiction; as such, they are more analogies for how we think, or live. As you say, we really can’t experience it in the flesh, and even if we could, it would only be at a human scale just as we don’t really experience climate so much as microclimate, or weather (whether we are looking at stars or viruses, we use devices like telescopes or microscopes to translate them into the human scale); yet a hyperobject as large as climate change has a huge influence on an individual’s daily experience (while the effect of individual action is local at best, but collectively, our individual actions can have a huge effect on climate).
And likewise, any fiction, or any narrative can only be a cartoon, a sliver or incomplete glance – but one that can hopefully give an intimation of things beyond itself. For me, it’s more a means for narrative composition (that in itself embodies a way of thinking) – the way jump cuts in film are both a modern way to organize a narrative, and people become modern by watching films with jump cuts, and go away able to organize their own lives or thoughts in similar ways (maybe by collage and juxtaposition instead of linear plots?). The ways we organize our narratives are as important as the narratives told so I hope organizing a story around a concept like emergence will give a better sense of what it is to be alive at our moment – much more so than writing as if emergence, or the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle didn’t exist; or maybe it’s more of an intimation of why we think the things we do – even if rendered in a schematic, or cartoon form.